John Fitzgerald Kennedy, often called JFK, (May 29, 1917 - November 22, 1963) was the 35thPresident of the United States of America, serving for 1033 days in 1961-63. He was the youngest person elected president and one of the most glamorous and popular. His record of presidential accomplishments remains a subject of debate among historians and the public, but after his assassination he became a legendary figure in whom admirers saw the ideals of American mythology incarnated.

The Kennedy Family had long been leaders of the Irish Catholic wing of the Democratic Party; Kennedy was middle-of-the-road on domestic issues and conservative on foreign policy, sending military forces into Cuba and Vietnam. In Congress the Conservative Coalition blocked nearly all of his domestic programs, so there were few changes in domestic policy, even as the civil rights movement gained strength.

The Kennedy style called for youth, dynamism, vigor and an intellectual approach to aggressive new policies in foreign affairs. The downside was his inexperience in foreign affairs, standing in contrast to the vast experience of the president he replaced, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower. Kennedy's rashness and inexperience caused a national humiliation in 1961 as he sent CIA-trained Cuban exiles into an ill-prepared attack on Castro's Cuba. At the Bay of Pigs, all the invaders were killed or captured, and he was forced to negotiate for the survivors release giving Cuba medical and food. Kennedy's supporters blamed the fiasco on Eisenhower, for JFK inherited the plan; but Kennedy took the blame himself. Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev, seeing for himself Kennedy's inexperience at a summit conference, threw up the Berlin Wall as the Soviets escalated the Cold War regarding the status of Berlin, predicting correctly that Kennedy's response would be weak. Khrushchev went too far in 1962 when he sent nuclear missiles into Cuba aimed at the U.S. For the first time since Pearl Harbor -- or indeed since Washington and New Orleans were attacked in the War of 1812-- the U.S. was vulnerable to a major attack by an enemy power. Kennedy and Khrushchev reached a compromise whereby the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba publicly, while Kennedy secretly removed American missiles from Turkey aimed at the Soviets, and also promised that America would never invade Cuba. In Vietnam, Kennedy increased the number of military advisors from 900 to 16,000 to prop up the ineffective, corrupt regime in South Vietnam. Historians are uncertain whether Kennedy would have avoided the failures of Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam.

He was assassinated on November 22, 1963 while riding in his convertible limousine in Dallas, Texas. A Communist sympathizer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was allegedly the only assassin, and afterward Kennedy became a national icon and martyr. His reputation has since been dimmed by news of his philandering. He is best known for his call to civic virtue:

“

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.

Career

Educated at private schools and Harvard College, young Kennedy was an indifferent student until the war in Europe focused his attention. Extensive interviews with major British politicians and observers led to an unusually precocious senior thesis that became an influential book, "Why England Slept" (1940). As second son in the powerful Kennedy Family, he was marked for an intellectual career as a writer or journalist, while his older brother Joseph was slated for politics by their hyper-manipulative father, Joseph P. Kennedy. His brother’s death in combat, combined with JFK’s heroic war record as skipper of the PT-109, set the stage for his political debut as a Congressional candidate in 1946.

Medical

Kennedy was the sickest president since William Henry Harrison, but he successfully kept his multiple maladies a secret from the press and policy makers. Besides Addison's disease, Kennedy's most serious problem was chronic back pain, which surfaced when he strained an unstable back (probably birth-related) a number of times, both in his youth and during his PT boat service during the war.[2] Surgery in 1944 only worsened the condition; by 1954 Kennedy found the pain so acute that he underwent back surgery once again despite the risk of an Addisonian crisis, which nearly took his life.[3]

As a teenager, Kennedy was in and out of hospitals for chronic colitis, stomach problems, and an undisclosed blood condition, which was at first mistakenly diagnosed as leukemia. Dr. Janet Travell, a specialist in the treatment of muscular disorders, was his primary physician after 1955, but other specialists tried any number of different treatments. As president he took seven powerful prescription drugs daily including hydrocortisone, fludrocortisone acetate, and Meticorten for Addison's disease, a malfunction of the adrenal glands; and T3 for hypothyroidism. In addition he regularly took Equanil for anxiety and tension; for his gastrointestinal problems he took anti-spasmodics Lomotil and Bentyl; for weight gain a daily dose of testosterone; and Chlor-Trimeton for his allergies. White House physicians were alarmed when they learned he was seeing Dr. Max Jacobson, a New York City celebrity physician, who injected him with a concoction of amphetamines, steroids, calcium, placenta, and vitamins, a potentially dangerous combination for his chronic back pain.[4] Historians have not identified a single policy decision that seems to have been affected by his physical condition or medical treatments; they believe he never took any illegal drugs.[5]

Politics

Although the father had abandoned Boston in frustration, JFK’s return to the city restored the family’s traditional power base among the large and powerful Irish-American community in Massachusetts. Strong family connections with the Chicago Irish political community (led by Mayor Richard J. Daley) augmented his national Catholic base. JFK always had two sets of advisors, an inner circle of Irish politicians who planned his campaigns, and a Protestant-Jewish coterie of intellectuals (mostly from Harvard) who promoted his stature as the intellectual in politics. That image was solidified by the Pulitzer Prize awarded his Profiles in Courage (1956). JFK possessed powerful assets: an excellent speaker and glib commentator on major issues, a middle-of-the-road political record that offended no one, strong expertise in foreign policy, articulate anti-Communism, unfailing charm and stage presence, a national network of Irish allies, a Catholic base that comprised a fourth of the electorate, and an immense purse that was ready to fund his ambitions, not to mention innumerable relatives who campaigned endlessly on his behalf.

JFK fought his way into the Senate in 1952 by defeating incumbent Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the archetypal Yankee. Kennedy largely ignored the old-boy Senate (controlled by his rival Lyndon Johnson) to display his talents through newspaper and television interviews, magazine articles, and highly publicized speeches around the country. Aided by his closest advisor, his brother Robert Kennedy, JFK appealed to conservatives by tolerating Joe McCarthy[6] and launching attacks on corrupt labor leaders, especially Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters Union.

The Kennedy family represented the conservative wing of the Democratic party, and was known for its anti-Communism and close ties with Republican Senator Joe McCarthy Many liberal Democrats, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, distrusted JFK primarily because they could never forget the father’s break with Franklin Roosevelt or the family’s support for McCarthy. Yet with the fading away of Adlai Stevenson (the liberal Democratic candidate in 1952 and 1956), liberals lacked a viable candidate.

Nomination

By 1960 JFK was the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination to face Richard M. Nixon, with the biggest question mark whether his Catholic base of support would be outweighed by anti-Catholicism of the sort that hurt Al Smith so badly in 1928. Of course prohibition was no longer an issue, and fear of Tammany-like bossism had faded away with the demise of most big city machines. The Kennedy juggernaut defeated rival Hubert Humphrey, a liberal, in the West Virginia primary, a state with so much poverty and so few Catholics that party leaders were convinced they had a winner. Kennedy won over the party’s intellectuals by his effective academic connections, while shaming doubters by a brilliant performance before the Protestant ministers of Houston. There he enunciated the position that he did not speak for the Catholic Church on matters of religion, and it did not speak for him on public affairs. He was able to take that position because there were no high intensity moral issue such as abortion at that time.

Although JFK’s religiosity consisted of nominal attendance at Sunday Mass, he excited tens of millions of Catholics who saw his election as president as confirmation of their full recognition as true Americans. With 8 of 10 Catholics voting for Kennedy, he ran up majorities in ethnic strongholds like Chicago that provided the narrow margin of victory against Richard Nixon. Apart from a few pockets of anti-popery among some Midwestern Lutherans and Southern Baptists, fears of Catholicism largely disappeared from the voting booth after 1960, and Kennedy gets credit for bringing Catholics into the American political mainstream.

Foreign policy

Kennedy was primarily interested in foreign policy. Weeks after his memorable inaugural address sounded the tocsin for vigorous anti-communism, he encountered disaster when his invasion of Cuba failed at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and he was forced to pay ransom of $53 million U.S. dollars in food and medicine in exchange for the 1,113 prisoners and 76 other exiles being held in Cuba.[7] Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, sensing weakness, pushed hard on the Berlin issue, and was able to build the Berlin Wall in East Berlin, despite Kennedy’s later rhetoric, "Ich bin ein Berliner!" ("I am a Berliner!")

Peace Corps

He launched the Peace Corps by executive order in 1961, putting his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver in charge. It was mainly designed to be a new weapon in the U.S. Cold War arsenal, one that could reach the people directly at the grass roots not merely their national leaders. Kennedy in the 1960 campaign promised to form the agency, saying:

"I believe that as a counter to the flood of well trained and accomplished tacticians now helping nations with their problems that the Communists are sending out, I believe an American Peace Corps...could be trained to help these people live a life of freedom in agriculture, in handiwork, in road building, in government and other skills, young Americans who will represent the cause of freedom around the globe."[8]

The Peace Corps has been endorsed by all subsequent presidents; nearly 200,000 Americans have served helping underdeveloped nations through personal humanitarian aid. It is still in operation, albeit with a modest record of achievement.

Ireland

Kennedy paid a state visit to Ireland in 1963 - the first state visit of an American President to the country, which had secured independence from Britain forty years earlier. Kennedy visited his ancestral home in County Wexford, and was greeted by huge crowds in the cities of Dublin, Limerick and Cork. He told crowds that once he had completed his term as president, he would like to become US Ambassador to Ireland, and live there.

Cuban Missile Crisis

Khrushchev and Castro went too far in 1962, secretly setting up medium range missiles in Cuba equipped with nuclear warheads that threatened the southeast United States. In his greatest moment, Kennedy rejected invasion plans but imposed a blockade and demanded the missiles be removed immediately. Khrushchev publicly backed down, but privately got Kennedy to agree to removing the older U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey; while Castro secured the promise that the United States would never invade his island. Realizing how close they had come to war, Kennedy and Khrushchev became much friendlier in public. In 1963, they signed a test ban treaty which eliminated nuclear testing above ground or in space; the treaty was further designed to hobble China and other countries trying to build their first bombs. The Cuban missile crisis reversed JFK’s image of ineptness in foreign policy, but his quiet, escalation of military involvement in Vietnam set the stage for the whirlwind reaped by his successor.

Domestic policy

As senator, JFK had shown limited interest in domestic affairs apart from labor union corruption. Working with his high-powered economic advisors he proposed a Keynesian program to stimulate the economy, not by higher spending but by tax cuts. No matter: most all of his domestic policy initiatives went anywhere. Congress was effectively controlled a conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats. Kennedy authorized the de-segregation of federal housing. He later proposed the civil rights bill, which passed after his death. He boosted the NASA space program and pledged to put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. Likewise he proposed tax cuts, all which occurred after his death.

Civil rights

A new issue that Kennedy had not anticipated blazed into view as the civil rights movement in the South, led by Martin Luther King, produced dramatic confrontations for JFK with segregationist Democrats, especially Governors George Wallace of Alabama, and Ross Barnett of Mississippi. In 1962, Kennedy sent federal marshals and Army MP’s to enforce a federal court order that African American student James Meredith be admitted to the University of Mississippi. Violent resistance by certain townspeople left two civilians dead, hundreds injured, and 166 federals injured. The 1963 confrontation in Alabama was nonviolent, and although Wallace did back down, the event boosted his visibility as a leader of southern Democrats. JFK ignored the risks to his southern base and spoke out in favor of civil rights legislation, but as in so many instances, the bill was passed after his death.

Legacy

Bust of John F. Kennedy by Robert Berks.

Kennedy’s assassination in November, 1963, was a stunning shock to all Americans. Pierson (2007) argues that the liberal media turned Kennedy's death into a martyrdom against racism, ignoring Kennedy's weaker interest in race and his strong opposition to Communism. Lee Harvey Oswald's strong Communist ties were downplayed, and instead, the conservative city of Dallas was made the guilty party. Incoming president Lyndon Johnson used the martyrdom theme to rally support for his liberal programs, painting them as memorials to Kennedy until Johnson won reelection in 1964 by a landslide over conservative leader Barry Goldwater.

The Catholic community took his assassination hard, and immediately elevated JFK to a sort of sainthood status, celebrating the miracle that he had liberated them from second class citizenship. Johnson in 1964 successfully retained the Catholic base JFK had fostered, but that was the last hurrah. By 1966 Catholics started showing their disillusionment with Johnson, who never recovered from the wave after wave of urban riots, nor from the disillusionment of his Vietnam War policy. With the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968, and the failure of youngest brother Ted Kennedy to recover his brothers’ national base, the Kennedy legacy increasingly became the romantic memory. Disclosures of JFK’s affairs, and detailed reports of his multiple grave medical problems fascinated the public but failed to break the myth that if JFK had lived, his second term would be a story of political triumphs restoring people’s faith in government. The assassination was so incomprehensible that hundreds of conspiracy theories have sprung up with over 350 people and organizations have been named as guilty of the event.

Kennedy appointed liberal Arthur Goldberg to the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as Byron White (who held both liberal and conservative positions). Kennedy's image appears on the American half-dollar coin.

Was Kennedy a liberal or a conservative?

Kennedy was basically a conservative, but he had to appeal to a primarily liberal base, so he offered symbols for the liberals while following a conservative course in foreign and domestic policy. After his death Kennedy's legacy was picked up by liberals, and there is a vague notion to the effect that Kennedy was a liberal. He was actually more of a conservative.[9]

To be a liberal in the days when Kennedy was in politics, 1946-63, meant supporting the programs of the New Deal, following in the footsteps of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and upholding the New Deal Coalition. Support for labor unions was important; support for civil rights had been a minor issue (and one more associated with the Republican Party). Hostility to the Catholic Church was common among liberals. In foreign policy liberals had turned away from Roosevelt's détente with the Soviets and had adopted the containment policy. Liberals rejected rollback, that is efforts to remove Communists regimes from power. Verbal support for the United Nations was standard rhetoric, although in practice it meant little. The symbolically most important issue of them all for liberals was opposition to Joe McCarthy and his style of aggressive anti-Communism.

On most of these points Kennedy was largely on the conservative side. He had a base in Massachusetts with many strong liberals in academe and labor unions that had to be appeased, so he never attacked liberalism too loudly. He solved the state problem by a close alliance with the Democratic party organizations in the cities, controlled mostly by Irish politicians. JFK's campaign manager and chief confidante was his brother Bobby, a devout Catholic who was in close touch with the Catholic establishment and the local machines. JFK thus maintained very close ties to the Catholic establishment; he carefully followed the required public rituals of the Catholic church. It was a major achievement by Kennedy in 1960 to resolve the religious issue and bring Catholics into the mainstream of American life and to the top ranks of national leadership.[10]

On foreign policy he was a leading anti-Communist hawk; he won in 1960 by attacking Eisenhower's foreign policies as not aggressive enough. When elected he sent forces to invade Cuba and rollback Communism; he increased the military presence in Vietnam; he sent the Navy to confrontation with the Soviets in the Cuban Missile Crisis, forcing the Soviets to withdraw. Liberals have misread these episodes--saying that the Cuban invasion was really Eisenhower's idea; that in Vietnam he might have changed his mind in a second term; and that in Cuba he was liberal because he did not blow the world up.

On the liberal side, he achieved the creation of the Peace Corps. To combat Communism in Latin America he proposed a liberal program of financial and technical assistance and free-food programs, and indicated he would take a sympathetic view of revolutionary movements that have the legitimate objective of bettering the life of the hemisphere's poor and downtrodden. Kennedy explicitly exempted any such movements dominated by "external"—meaning Communist—forces, thereby shutting the door on renewed diplomatic relations with Fidel Castro's Cuba

On domestic issues, as president he tried to cut taxes and blocked his liberal advisors who wanted deficit spending in 1961. Civil rights were not a major concern until 1963. On unions, he built up a reputation of strong opposition to union corruption, especially in the Teamsters; he quietly kept on good terms with George Meany, the AFL-CIO leader, while avoiding Walter Reuther, the leader of the liberal wing of the AFL-CIO.

Kennedy had a pro-business reputation and sponsored policies such as tax cuts and low inflation that conservative businessmen wanted. On taking office he called for a "full-fledged alliance" with business. He did get into a brush-up with the steel industry when the steelmen broke their promise to him to keep prices down; that move made Kennedy more popular among the anti-business liberals, but Kennedy never proposed major legislation that business opposed. He named Douglas Dillon, a leading Republican businessman, as his Secretary of the Treasury. On dealing with unemployment, he never proposed New-Dealish programs but instead had a package that was acceptable to conservative Republicans.[11]

Crime was a signature issue for Kennedy, and on taking office he promised a major crackdown on organized crime, thus appealing to conservatives. On appointing Brother Bobby as Attorney General, he quipped, "I can't see that it's wrong to give him a little legal experience before he goes out to practice law." On the liberal side, Kennedy asked Congress for federal aid for school construction and more money for federally assisted housing. They did not oblige.

Joe McCarthy was a close friend of the Kennedy family. Joe Kennedy was his biggest financial backer. Bobby Kennedy began his career as an aide to McCarthy. Liberals intensely hated McCarthy and that carried over to the entire Kennedy clan. JFK was not close to McCarthy, but he refused to attack him publicly or to vote for his Senate censure in 1954 when McCarthy's career was collapsing.

Quotes

"The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining."

"The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us." Oct 26, 1963

"And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man." Inaugural address, January 20, 1961

"The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger - but recognize the opportunity." Speech in Indianapolis, April 12, 1959

Reeves, Richard. President Kennedy: Profile of Power (1993), balanced assessment of policies

Reeves, Thomas. A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy (1991) detailed assessment of his character flaws by conservative historian excerpt and text search

Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (2002) [1965], major memoir by a close advisor; Pulitzer Prize for Biography and National Book Award winner excerpt and text search

Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. Robert Kennedy And His Times (2002) [1978], scholarly biography and National Book Award winner

↑ The best studies of Kennedy's relations with liberalism are William E. Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan (2001) pp 63-120 [ excerpt and text search]; Alonzo Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers: From F.D.R. to Bush (1992) excerpt and text search. Leuchtenburg is a liberal and Hamby is a conservative; both are excellent historians.

↑By contrast, the only Catholic in Eisenhower's cabinet was a plumber who was Secretary of Labor.

↑ House Republican Minority Leader Charles Halleck said of those proposals: "We find no great quarrel with them, but we do not find them earthshaking." Time Feb. 10, 1961